Saturday, April 27, 2013

The Treasures of Kenwood House, London

Earth Day, April 23rd, 2013. 9:35 p.m.

I
go online and post a paragraph on Facebook, an excerpt from an essay by Walter
Benjamin titled “Experience and Poverty,” in which he refers to the joyless
properties of glass: “It is no
coincidence that glass is such a hard, smooth material to which nothing can be
fixed. A cold and sober material into the bargain. Objects made of glass have
no ‘aura.’ Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of
possession.”

I add a photo of
Dale Chihuly’s Garden and Glass exhibit beneath it to underscore Benjamin’s
point. But just to be sure everyone gets the connection, I add “That this
aura-less, cold, sober chapel of bourgeois vapidity has replaced the ebullience
of the Fun Forest is an injury to the spirit. It speaks to Seattle's sea-change
from affordable, art-friendly city to a cheerless, affluent dysphoria of
clueless Bobos.”

I loved the Fun
Forest. This was a carnival-like zone left over from the Seattle’s World Fair
in 1962, the identical place where a 10-year-old Kurt Russell kicks Elvis
Presley in the shin in the movie It
Happened at the World’s Fair. There were rides such as a jeweled Borrelli
carousel, a Windstorm roller coaster offering a smooth fast ride laid out in a
multiple figure-eight configuration, Wild River log flume,
bumper cars, kiddy galleon, rainbow chaser, and an Orbiter which featured a cluster of cars mounted
on arms radiating from a central axis that lifted into a 90 degree horizontal
position when the ride was spinning. There were games of skill offering stuffed
animals as prizes, stands selling hot dogs and cotton candy, and a Flight to
Mars ride whose interior décor was studded with black lights and glow paint.
It’s all gone now, replaced with the cheerless Chihuly exhibit with its strong
commercial appeal and shabby pretense at art.

Tuesday, April 24th, 2013. 1:00 p.m.

It’s
a bright, sunny afternoon and the temperature is starting to rise into the
lower 60s. Roberta and I decide to hop on a bus and go to the art museum to see
Rembrandt and a few other Dutch masters. I love 17th century Dutch
art. Alas, there will be no Vermeer, but there will be some canvases and
techniques similar to Vermeer.

And there are: I’m transfixed by View of Dordrecht by Aelbert Cuyp. The
delicacy of the ships, the beauty of the clouds, the feeling of reality in the
serene water. The effects of the light are like sweet soft theorems of
illumination in paint. He has distorted reality to depict reality. He has
obscured reality to illumine reality. Cuyp was skilled at altering the
direction of light in a painting, bringing it to a diagonal position from the
back of the picture, so that the viewer faced the sun more or less directly.
The light appears to be emanating from the paint. This also gave a greater
feeling of depth to the space. I could dwell on this one painting for an hour.
But I continue. The gallery shines with 17th century light.

I see Family
in a Mediterranean Seaport by Jan Baptist Weenix, A Canal in Winter by Isack van Ostade, and Old London Bridge by Claude de Jongh. All the paintings on display
are from the Kenwood House collection in Hampstead, London, on the northern
boundary of Hampstead Heath. It must have been there when John Keats lived
nearby. The collection was once owned by Edward Cecil Guinness, the first Earl of Iveagh, an Irish philanthropist
and businessman. He died in 1927,
bequeathing his home and collection to the nation.

The highlight of the show is Rembrandt’s Self Portrait with Two Circles. I’ve
seen this painting many times before, but the reality of it, and its immense
size, is stunning. Rembrandt appears so astonishingly real and present and
soulfully available for meditations on art or philosophy or just the dubious
ritual of visiting an art museum that one’s own presence becomes unavoidable
and real. Whatever shadows and distractions haven been clinging to you
throughout the day dissipate. It is you and this old man.

And he is old, no question of that. His jowls sag,
his nose has the bulbous fleshiness associated with heavy drinking, his hair is
white and long, his body is corpulent and heavy, an effect heightened by the
heavy fur-lined robe he wears, and the white nightcap is a clear signal that he
has entered the nighttime of his life. It will soon be lights out and sleep
forever. But there is still great light and energy in his eyes and the way he
holds his mahlstick and paintbrushes and palette is nothing less than regal.
His face is highly expressive. There is great sadness and maturity there. He
has experienced the inevitable losses and disappointments of this all too
mortal life, and he is burdened with poverty and debt. But he is triumphant. He
has his creativity. It’s still going strong. This painting is proof of that.

After taking in nearly all the 17th
century paintings I entered the adjoining galleries which segued into the 18th
century, featuring work by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. I’ve
never been too excited about this phase in western European painting, but now
that the same disparities of wealth and poverty that led to the French
Revolution are in play again, it is particularly galling to see these
aristocratic pricks and their progeny. The conventions of 18th
century painting with their values of harmony, cool elegance and casual grace,
are pleasing to the eye and give one a sense of balance and meaning to the
universe, but this is a reflection of aristocratic wealth, the people who
employed painters such as Gainsborough and Reynolds. The work of poets and
painters such as William Blake during this era give a very different view, a
critical perspective that I happen to share. I feel like Jean-Paul Marat
wandering these galleries.

My heels are dogged by a tour group that began at
approximately the same time that Roberta and I started our viewing. An elderly
woman leads a group of some fifteen or twenty people of differing age and sex,
though few are younger than thirty. She seems to know her stuff and speaks with
enthusiasm about the paintings, parenthetically inserting allusions to the
European collections and museums she and her husband have visited on their
travels. Her group caught up with me at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Kitty
Fisher as Cleopatra dissolving a pearl. According to Pliny, in an effort to
impress Marc Antony with her prodigality, Cleopatra put out a great feast and
at the end plopped a pearl into a goblet of vinegar and then drank it after the
pearl dissolved. Reynolds chose this story for a particular reason, and I was
eager to hear about it. I was listening to the story of Kitty on the little
audio wand the museum provides at the entry to the show, how this remarkably
beautiful and charismatic woman rose from a humble life as a milliner to become
one of London’s most notorious femmes fatales, known for her affairs with men
of wealth, such as George William Coventry, 6th Earl of Coventry,
when the elderly woman with her flock of tourists intruded on me and began
speaking as if I weren’t standing there. I moved on, and went to find a
painting that the tour group wouldn’t reach for a few minutes.

This turned out to be one of the strangest paintings
I’d ever seen. Hawking in Olden Time
by Sir Edwin Landseer presents a ball of feathers and fury at the center of the
picture with a group of medieval hunters faintly represented off to the right
margin, riding up a knoll, stunned to see the sight of their falcon bringing
down a heron. I couldn’t quite make out which eyeball belonged to which bird,
so furious and energetic was this conflict. It looked like a whirling asteroid
of feathers. I lingered long enough for the tour group to arrive and listened
to the guide explain the nostalgia for the past people felt during the time
this painting was achieved, in 1832, right at the beginning of the industrial
revolution. I saw something other than just nostalgia. The birds were so
engulfed in a frenzy of survival and predation I could not help but feel a high
level of anxiety. One world was ending, another was beginning.

I did not expect to see Turner. I did not at first
that I was looking at a Turner. When I think of Turner I imagine dramatic
atmospheric effects, black engines in radiant mists, imposing buildings
engulfed in flames. Dramas of air and light in which the overarching mood is
clear as a Wagnerian opera but the specifics of what is occurring are
ambiguous. A Coast Scene with Fishermen
Hauling a Boat Ashore was highly detailed and offered a very clear
narrative: two boats have been run ashore and a third is at the mercy of
breakers during a mighty tempest that is pounding the shore with unabashed
fury. A group of men struggled mightily with muscle and rope to keep the two
boats from being swept back out to sea. I could feel the wind. I could feel the
wet salt air sting my cheeks. The dark mingling grays of the sky and the white
gnashing waves were sublime and merciless. I was trying to make out the fish
and detritus on the beach but the tour group engulfed me and the guide’s
opening words capsized my attention. I made for the exit.

When Roberta and I arrived home E was at work on the
front porch, scraping it with a stainless steel palette knife and a wire brush.
This was the third time in two years she was painting the porch. It’s been a
frustration for all of us in the building, but for her especially, since this
has been her project. The paint keeps chipping and flaking, resulting in a
calico surface of sour yellow cream and battleship gray. I offer to help. Roberta
and I go in, change our clothes, and return, each of us provided with a palette
knife from my toolbox. It’s hard work. We spend an hour at it. We tell her we
visited the exhibit of Dutch art at the Seattle art museum. I tried to describe
the power of the Joseph Turner canvas, since her husband K is a fisherman. E
tells us she and K visited the Chihuly exhibit recently. She didn’t seem that
enthusiastic. It occurs to me to share my recent posting on Facebook, and my
opinion about Dale Chihuly’s glass art, but decide to keep silent on the
subject, and keep scraping away at the porch.

About Me

John Olson is the author of Backscatter: New And Selected Poems, from Black Widow Press, Souls Of Wind, a novel about the notorious French poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West, from Quale Press, and The Nothing That Is, an autobiographical novel from Ravenna Press. Larynx Galaxy, a collection of essays and prose poetry, appeared in June, 2012, from Black Widow Press. The Seeing Machine , a novel about French painter Georges Braque, appeared from Quale Press in fall 2012.